Watch 21 flowers bloom in 2 minutes

A new time-lapse video offers an appropriately retro tribute to flower power.

Spring will officially spring this week in the Northern Hemisphere, and not much symbolizes that annual breakthrough like blooming flowers. But since most plants live in slow motion compared with humans, watching flowers bloom in real time is only slightly more entertaining than watching grass grow.

The video above was released this week by French video artist Thomas Blanchard, who stitched it together from nearly 10,000 photos he took over a four-month period. It features 21 types of flowers, each of which Blanchard photographed hundreds of times at intervals ranging from five to 13 minutes.

While these scenes of petals unfurling would be cool in any context, Blanchard helps them stand apart with throwback wallpaper instead of a black background — and especially with Linda Scott's 1961 single "Three Guesses" in lieu of the dramatic orchestral music so often used in time-lapse nature videos.

"I created this video simply because I love nature," Blanchard writes on Vimeo. "I always found the flower's timelapses fabulous, but most of the time they are made with a black background. Then I told myself to make a beautiful flower's timelapse with coloured and vintage backgrounds. To me, the 60's / 70's is the most representative period for the flowers. This is a way to pay tribute to them."